2014 was a hugely transformative year for us at The Philosopher’s Stoneground. We moved our business from Davis to Berkeley, we purchased a company van that runs on 100% local biodiesel from waste vegetable oil, we bought another business, Ostara Foods, whose stone ground coconut butter and Cocotella (chocolate coconut butter) products we are now producing and selling to Whole Foods Northern California, and we met our Permaculture hero Mark Shepard and got him and his team interested in designing our regenerative almond orchard…! Below we share some of our favorite moments from the year. Thanks for making it great with us! We look forward to collaborating with you to bring more awesomeness to fruition in 2015.

San Francisco Green Fest 2014!

If only the world were this way! Who killed the electric car…?

First fuel up with locally made biodiesel from waste vegetable oil in Sebastopol, California! October 16th.

Yesterday, after an awesome concert by Rising Appalachia at Impact HUB Oakland, I was reminded of the importance of fueling the good food movement with good music!

Tonight, we have the opportunity to experience another conscious musician, The Polish Ambassador, in San Francisco. He is on a Permaculture Action Tour, where they are playing a show in a city at night then leading a community garden or other Permaculture planting project the next morning.

We are inspired by this novel rocking way to regenerate the Earth, so we decided to feed the movement! Tomorrow morning, we will bring samples of sprouted almond butter line, including our latest creation: fermented sprouted almond butter! Read the Facebook event page for details.

We will also have our new lines of stone ground coconut butter and chocolate coconut butter called Cocotella to nourish those performing the Great Work of nourishing the Earth at Gill Tract in Albany.

If anyone is able to bring bread, crackers, apples, etc onto which we can spread the products we’re sharing, that would be much appreciated. See you tomorrow!

Pushing Through The Pavement: A Permaculture Action Tour led by Oakland musician The Polish Ambassador

We are grateful to announce the big news of our company: we just purchased Ostara Foods, who produces the finest stone ground coconut butter and chocolate coconut butter available on the market!

Our coconut butter is stone ground for over 24 hours to create a silky smooth texture. No more dry, chalky textures that plague the other brands of coconut butter! Cocotella is our chocolate coconut butter, which features the same dreamy coconut base with added cacao and coconut sugar.

We are honored to bring these products into the fold of our company. They are perfectly aligned with our Nourishing the Roots business model, as we are now aiming to create a network of coconut and cacao orchards in the tropics to directly source the ingredients for these products. Like Almondia, but in a different biome!

Visit the Ostara Foods website to see the current list of stores, which includes 26 Whole Foods in Northern California. Ostara products are also available online through Synchro.

We are thrilled to debut our new product lines in an epic way to a national audience at the National Heirloom Expo this Tuesday through Thursday in Santa Rosa! We hope to dazzle you there with our surprising method or presentation 😉

They say: “The National Heirloom Exposition is a not-for-profit event centered around the pure food movement, heirloom vegetables, and anti-GMO activism. Our third annual event held mid-September 2013 in Santa Rosa, California drew more than 18,000 people from around the country and beyond. With more than 100 speakers and 300 natural food vendors, the event was the largest gathering in pure food history! The Heirloom Expo has gained incredible interest among home growers, farmers, school groups and the general public–so much so that it is being called the ‘World’s Fair of Pure Food’!”

What the festival says about itself: “The Eat Real Festival is an annual celebration of good food with a focus on food craft, street food, artisan beers, local wines and fresh and delicious food choices—all featuring sustainable local ingredients. By using fresh and local ingredients, Eat Real shows how easy it is to support a regional food system by bringing farmers, food producers and eaters together. By its fifth year, Eat Real has generated more than $1.5 million in sales revenues for participating vendors, and garnered extensive media coverage. Over 500,000 people have attended our events since 2009.”

This festival is FREE, so we look forward to seeing you there!

Picture of Eat Real Festival from their website, http://eatrealfest.com/

We had an awesome time presenting at Slow Money Northern California’s Farm Fest on June 7th! For those of you who weren’t able to attend, I thought I’d post the text from my talk. I hope it serves as food for thought about what we’re trying to accomplish with The Philosopher’s Stoneground. Please get in touch with me by email if this resonates with you; I’d love to collaborate on making this happen! Best, Tim tim(at)thephilosophersstoneground.com

My name is Tim and I am the Chief Philosopher and Nut Alchemist of The Philosopher’s Stoneground. We are a young sprouted almond butter company.

When I was in high school, someone told me that with a degree in Philosophy, you can either flip burgers or write books. I didn’t heed their warning.

Now, I sprout almonds, sell my philosophy in a jar, and volunteer to read people stories about it. I will start by reading you a story that has become true over the past year.

Deep in the midst of an existential crisis concerning my life’s direction last year, on April 17th I received a detailed vision that it is my life’s work at this time to create a sprouted nut butter company. This company would educate people on the importance of sprouted food and raise funds for an ecological orchard to show a different way forward for almond agriculture.

Davis is where I started my business last year on Earth Day, smack dab in the heart of the Central Valley where 85% of the world’s almonds are grown. My house became the first certified Cottage Food Operation in Yolo County thanks to the California Homemade Food Act.

Within two months, I outgrew the confines of our home kitchen and moved into the back of a local restaurant, where I operated with the help of two employees for nine months before outgrowing that, too.

In May, we moved to Oakland to take our business to the next level! We now have a co-packer in San Mateo so we can focus on sales, distribution, and philosophizing.

Sprouting is a traditional way of preparing nuts and seeds by soaking them in salt water. This germinates the seeds, which makes them sweeter, more digestible, and more nutritious. Next, we dehydrate the almonds, then stone grind them into butter.

Our products are sold in 18 regional stores as well as online through Good Eggs, Real Food Bay Area, Albert and Eve Organics, and Three Stone Hearth. We sell at the Montclair Farmer’s Market, where you can buy or gift our product using the awesome Credibles service.

We are in the business of intelligent nourishment: spreading consciousness and nourishing all Life through delicious food designed for human consumption. We accomplish this by creating foods that are grown, produced, distributed, and consumed in a holistically healthy fashion for all places and organisms involved.

We are a big-picture company focused on facilitating the regeneration and flourishing of Life on Earth. Allow me to take you into the visionary realm of The Philosopher’s Stoneground. Perhaps I will tell you in five years that the following story has become true.

Knowing that a food product relies on good farms to produce raw ingredients, we invested in land and created a drought-tolerant ecological orchard. The first site was called Almondia. By vertically integrating Almondia into our company, we not only began to truly accomplish our goal of regenerative agriculture, but also secured the price of our ingredients in an otherwise volatile market.

We brought the wisdom of nature into the design of our farming ecosystem. From a look at history, we saw that nearly every culture which was based on annual agriculture failed. With this in mind, we chose perennial tree crops such as oak and chestnut as the keystone species, followed underneath by almond, walnut, pecan, and hazelnut trees.

Below that, we planted native berry shrubs, vegetables, and herbs. In between these three-dimensional rows, we planted perennial grasses and industrial hemp as our alley crop, which finally became legal again in 2014 and started a second industrial revolution. Integrating holistically managed animals and insects further boosted the vibrancy of Life in the orchard.

To bring indigenous cultural wisdom back to the mainstream food system, we re-introduced and popularized sprouting as a form of processing all grains, nuts, seeds, and beans. We grow a variety of staple food crops that we process into a diverse cutting-edge product line, including gluten-free acorn and chestnut flours, sprouted nut butters, and the traditional animal and vegetable farm yields.

Vertical integration of our manufacturing facility cut costs and carbon pollution. The manufacturing of our food happens on the orchard in a certified living building that biomimics the model of a flower in its design. Kitchen workers enjoy plenty of natural sunlight and views of the abundant orchard outside.

We distribute using trucks powered by the hemp biodiesel we grow and process onsite. Our tractor bodies are made of and fueled by plastic from this hemp. The roads and buildings on site are made of hempcrete.

With full vertical integration of our company, we became sure that we were holistically and effectively promoting the regeneration and flourishing of life on Earth. As Life thrives, carbon is cut, and profits blossom.

Excess profits finance the expansion of our regenerative network of cultivation, manufacturing, and distribution. Our non-profit educates people about our open-source business model called “Nourishing the Roots” to encourage its worldwide spread.

Thank you for listening to my two stories. Please talk to me if you want to help make the second story come true!

We are honored to be one of the ten entrepreneur showcases at the Slow Money Northern California Farm Fest on Saturday from 11-4 in Sunnyvale! Come out for a great time of local food economy fermentation. See their flyer and information listed below:

June 7, 2014 at Full Circle Farm in SunnyvaleFarm Tour, Entrepreneur Showcase, Community Potluck, Live Music, and lots of conversations and networking!

Special for Slow Money friends: use code slowpotluck to receive a discount when registering for two or more

The Entrepreneur Showcase is always a highlight at Slow Money Farm Fests. Local businesses present their contributions to our food system and the plans for growth.The 10 presenters for the June 7 Farm Fest are listed in the agenda below. We received over 70 applications. The choices were hard. You will enjoy this showcase!

For parties of 2 or more, Slow Money friends can enter the code slowpotluck to receive tickets for $17.50.*) Full Circle Farm is an educational farm. At the start of the program, all the children will go on our school tour with Moses. When they return, a children’s activity area will be waiting. Coloring, origami flower pots, seed planting, worm races, and more.”

As of Friday, we are happy to be the newest registered business in the city of Oakland! We moved here from Davis in order to take our business to the next level and join the vibrant network of artisanal food producers creating an awesome local food system here in the East Bay Area of Northern California.

We are excited to celebrate one year in the business of Intelligent Nourishment! A year ago today, I sent out messages to several listservs in Davis announcing the availability of my sprouted almond butter for purchase. With that, the seed of The Philosopher’s Stoneground was sprouted!

At that time, I was producing out of my home kitchen using a Vita Mix blender. It wouldn’t be until June 1 when I got the stone grinder and dreamed up the name for the company. I operated this tiny two-pound grinder through several thousand dollars in sales over the course of two and a half months until it became ridiculous and we finally received our larger grinder! Since then, we have been more able to keep up with demand, though our production capacity is still behind our demand.

I moved out of the home kitchen and into a commercial kitchen at the end of June. We just finished our time in that kitchen and are now re-locating our operation to the Bay Area starting on May 1st! I am excited for the next year in business and can’t imagine how far it will take us compared to the rapid growth and transformation we’ve experienced this year. The adventure is sure to be incredible!

I am grateful to be supported in our mission and vision by our great community of fans and friends. I am equally grateful to the Earth for being the host to all of the lovely activities that we enjoy! Here’s to another great trip around the sun seeing that The Great Work is done.

Solution: create biodiverse food forests from which to source the nuts and seeds that we use for our products.

This would be the best birthday gift ever. I bet you or some people you know could help give it to me!

On Earth Day 2013, I founded The Philosopher’s Stoneground as a mission-driven sprouted nut and seed butter company with the goal of using its profits to create Almondia, the world’s first Permaculture almond orchard to supply the nuts and seeds for our products with ecological methods of food cultivation.

We call our open source business model “Nourishing the Roots.” The model works like this: a food product company creates demand for ingredients and starts generating revenue in their product sales. Revenue is used to support or establish an ecological agriculture project that wholesomely grows ingredients for the company. The cycle is established: land feeding company feeding people feeding land.

Excess revenues can be used to support and establish further orchards. In this way, we will create self-seeding systems of abundance that nourish Life at every level in every step of the production and consumption processes.

Now, after nearly a year in the food business, I am seeing that the margins of this industry are relatively low and that it could take quite some time (and an exponential degree of scaling up) to achieve this vision. I am willing to devote myself to this cause, but I am also wondering whether the food product business on its own is the best (or only) tool with which to create the biodiverse orchards to supply our company and provide a bounty of other types of food that could provide income for other farmers and food businesses.

Moreover, after a phenomenally inspiring conference called Permaculture Voices two weeks ago, I am seeing that I want to put this orchard in the ground NOW. As the old adage goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time was yesterday, and the third best time is NOW!I, like many of us, am feeling the urgent need to radically redirect the course of human activity on this planet starting with my own actions, and implementing regenerative agriculture projects is one of the best ways to do so, particularly here in the world food production capital of California.

Planting Almondia would allow us to become vertically integrated as the first nut and seed butter company to source its nuts and seeds from an ecological food forest rather than from industrial scale monocultures. The problems of almond monoculture cannot be understated.

California orchards produce 85% of the world’s almonds, but unfortunately the status quo of large scale almond monoculture is detrimental to the health of the trees, bees, ecosystems, and people involved (even when it’s organic, though to a lesser degree). Nature does not work in monocultures; neither should we, if we hope for true abundance and resiliency.

I am working on writing an article detailing these facts, but in the meantime, I would recommend reading this article on the drought and California almonds as well as watching the documentary More Than Honey. This film chronicles the largest human-induced pollination event on the planet, which happens every spring when beekeepers nationwide ship their bees to pollinate California’s almond orchards. This event is a major contributing factor to Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been decimating bee populations.

Why make it the distant goal of our company to establish an orchard with money that will come slowly over time, when we already have a company whose connections could sprout an orchard NOW? Why individually plan to make a better world later when we know we need to act together to create one NOW?

Once we have one example established, we will continue to sprout a vibrant network of Permaculture orchards as quickly, powerfully, and abundantly as the thousands of seeds we sprout every day. Can you imagine re-creating California’s Central Valley into the abundant cornucopia that it was before modern extractive agriculture laser-leveled it into a desert??

Given that this new Aries moon happening today is such a powerful time to plant seeds of intention in this astrological new year, and the fact that my 27th birthday was yesterday, why not ask the universe for something I really want? I am requesting help from your portion of this great universe to attract a parcel (or parcels!) of land on which we can plant our food forests!

The land can be anywhere that has the climate (and the water!) to support almond trees. I am looking for collaborators in this project, including landowners, financial wizards, and land use wizards helping on the ground with design and implementation.

For an example of farm-scale Permaculture that already exists in a different part of the world, see my favorite land use wizard Mark Shepard’s video, look at his New Forest Farm in Wisconsin, or read his book “Restoration Agriculture.”

I recently had the privilege of participating in a two-day workshop with Mark on creating drought-tolerant food forests. I learned beyond any shadow of a doubt that not only is this new type of perennial polycultural food production possible, but it is happening now!

We are collaborating to form a network of Permaculture food growers and manufacturers and we need more folks to get involved with this pursuit. For conscious consumers, sourcing food from holistically sustainable biodiverse farms represents the next level of conscious consumption.

I am confident that the breath of humanity represented by you reading this webpage and your web of relationships is more than enough to germinate the seeds of these projects. All we need is to cross-pollinate to help each other make the connections!

How can you help us manifest an ecological food production system? Any thoughts, connections, land to utilize, or other offerings would be much appreciated. Email me at tim(at)thephilosophersstoneground.com with your contribution to this piece of the mysterious Universe puzzle.

Remember that real wealth comes in the form of clean air, pure water, healthy soil, and rich symbiotic relationships between all the organisms that share Life on this planet.